Across the globe, public school education systems have mostly remained hard pressed. The governments find it difficult to keep injecting additional public funds into this sector, despite the utmost urgency to do so.
The result is that public school education systems in many countries have to grapple with severe resource constraints. They also face the challenge of making basic or primary education accessible to possibly every child of the society.
In addition to the above challenges, the Covid-19 pandemic introduced a host of new issues for public education providers. Studies have shown that Cloud powered schooling systems result in a much improved and enriched learning experience for young students.
Related: Cloud Computing Set to Trigger Massive Growth in Education
Pre-pandemic Role of Cloud in Education
The Cloud is not entirely new for public education providers. However, the pandemic ushered in a wave of urgency to accelerate any on-going cloud learning initiatives and adopt them from scratch in some instances.
Some stats were collected about the role of Cloud in public education during the month of March, 2020. This was a time when mostly lockdowns had not been enforced at a mass scale. These stats reveal that the Cloud had already made in-roads in public education.
An overwhelming 82% of the surveyed public education providers were already hosting some part of their systems over the Cloud. 52% of the respondents had already deployed cloud powered Learning Management Systems (LMS).
Out of the surveyed schools, a decent 39% had stored their curriculum and other learning content over the Cloud. With an accelerated move towards the Cloud after the pandemic, this last stat is believed to have substantially increased.
Related: How Can dinCloud Solutions Transform the Education Sector?
Here are some key benefits that are being felt by taking public education to the Cloud.
- Even small IT teams of public schools can manage the cloud environment.
- Students have round the clock access to learning resources over the Cloud.
- Teachers can virtually interact with students, at a time of mutual convenience.
- Virtual classrooms and other digital resources making learning more immersive.
- Public schools can save the costs associated with on-premise hardware.
- Cloud resources can be scaled up or down, as and when the needs change.
- Over the Cloud, public education becomes more affordable and accessible.
Below are some of the challenges that public education providers might face when moving over to the Cloud.
Related: Cloud Adoption by Higher Education Providers Expected to Soar
Network Limitations
In the initial days of moving to the Cloud, quite a few public schools faced the limitations of their internal network. This resulted in issues related to connectivity and speed, resulting in a sub-par learning experience. The network must be up-graded to handle the load.
Bandwidth Issues
This could be the next issue that you run into, as a public school, because a large number of students would be accessing learning resources simultaneously. Therefore, IT staff should provision a decent amount of bandwidth for a seamless learning experience.
Automation of Recurring Tasks
Some tasks such as load balancing or network monitoring will work best if they are automated. This will greatly limit the element of human error and also extract the optimal performance from the available resources.
Training and Development of IT Staff
For a lot of public schools, the Cloud based learning may be a totally new concept. So, the on-campus IT staff needs to be provided adequate training to effectively handle the new infrastructure and environment.
Related: 7 Leading DaaS Trends and Benefits in Higher Education
Conclusion
The Cloud is making public school education a lot more accessible, effective and affordable. Although the road might be a bit bumpy, the ultimate results are worth all the effort. After all, this is an investment in the nation’s future.
If you are a public education provider and looking to move to the Cloud, Contact Us for some of the best solutions in the industry.
